The Façade at Poggio a Sorbo

by Leon Battista Alberti, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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The letter came up from Rome in the saddlebag of a cloth-carrier. It had a smear of blue woad across one corner, and its seal showed an eye with wings. The cloth-carrier had sat on it for six days, and for the last three it had rained. Tonio di Bernardo dried it by the lime kiln before he broke the seal. It was the first instruction he had ever received from a man he had not met. He wanted it whole.

There was one sheet of drawing and a second sheet of writing, in a hand so even that it seemed to have been ruled first and written afterwards.

To Master Tonio, mason, at Poggio a Sorbo. Greetings.

I have not drawn this front in any braccio, neither yours nor ours nor the Roman. Every town keeps its own braccio on a bar of iron chained to the wall of its palace, and each believes its own is the true one. They differ by a finger, sometimes by a hand. A building made from such measures carries the quarrel of two towns in its stones. Take instead the width of the ground your patron owns along the piazza, wall to wall. Divide it into six. One of those parts is the measure of everything; I will call it the module. Then:

The whole front is six modules wide and four high to the top of the cornice.

The door is one module wide and two high.

The two windows on either side stand one module from the door and one from the corners, and are each half a module wide and one high.

The frieze under the cornice is half a module, and in it the inscription your patron asks for, in Roman letters, which I send drawn on the reverse.

Above the cornice the pediment rises one module and a half, and in its triangle there is nothing. Nothing. Do not let anyone put a thing there.

If you do these things, the front will agree with itself as a man's hand agrees with his arm. Its parts will answer one another. If anyone asks you to alter one of them, show him this letter. If he will not read it, ask him whether he would like his nose made longer by a finger, so that people may see it from farther off.

There was no name. The eye with wings was the whole signature.

Tonio read it through twice by the kiln, his lips moving at the numbers. Then he took a cord and walked out into the piazza with the smith's boy, Pippo, to measure the frontage of the ground where the oratory of Santa Nanna was to stand. Properly speaking it was to be the oratory of San Giovanni Decollato, since the bishop would not consecrate a chapel to a dead woman of the town merely because her husband had money. But the town already called it Santa Nanna. When Tonio and Pippo stretched the cord from the house of the Ugurgieri to the corner of the cloth-shearers' lane, a woman leaning out of a window above them said, "Measuring for the widow-maker's saint?" and laughed, and drew the shutter.

The cord came to eighteen braccia of Poggio a Sorbo and a little over. Tonio knotted it at eighteen and made the knot hard with his teeth.

"Three," he said to the boy.

"Three what?"

"Three braccia to the part. Six parts across." He folded the cord, then folded it again, and then into three, and held up one length of it against the light. "That is the whole building. All of it is in there."

Pippo looked at the brown piece of cord as boys look at the conjuror's empty hand.

---

Agnolo Brandolini dealt in wool. He had made his money dyeing undyed cloth from the Casentino the colour of cloth from Flanders, and selling it in Siena at a price somewhere between the two. He was a short man, wide in the shoulder. He had a way of standing with his thumbs inside his belt, as if holding himself together at the middle. His wife Nanna had died in the Lent of the year before, of a fever that came up from the Chiana marshes with the spring water. Within a month he had bought the two old houses on the piazza, pulled them down, and written to Rome.

Why to Rome, and to whom, he never said. The town supposed that someone at the papal court owed him money, or that he owed someone there, and that this was how such debts were paid. Tonio did not suppose anything. He had built walls for forty years, for the Ugurgieri and the commune and the Franciscans, from other men's drawings and from no drawings at all. In those years he had learned that the reason a wall is wanted is the patron's business, and the reason it stands is the mason's.

By the feast of San Giovanni the foundations were in and the front had risen to the sill of the windows. The stone was the grey sandstone from the quarry below the Fonte Vecchia, which cuts well when it is wet and hardens in the air. Tonio set out the door with a rod he had cut to exactly three braccia and marked in halves and quarters. He made a second rod at one and a half, for the windows, so that nobody on the scaffold would have to divide in his head. The men called the long rod il Romano and the short one il Romanino. They swore by them, and at them, and when Pippo once used the short one to knock a wasp's nest off the scaffold Tonio struck him across the ear with the long one. Then he made him wash both in the trough and dry them in the shade, not the sun, so they would not warp.

Agnolo came every evening. He did not climb the scaffold. He stood in the piazza with his thumbs in his belt and looked across it at San Francesco.

The Franciscans' church had been finished before Tonio was born. Its front was brick, and it was large. It had a great round window, and above the window a gable that rose higher than anything in Poggio a Sorbo except the bell-tower of the commune. Some guardian of the friars, in a fit of devotion or rivalry, had painted the gable with a Saint Francis receiving the stigmata, now flaking. The Saint Francis looked down across the piazza, and the five wounds of his hands and feet and side had faded to the colour of old brick.

"How high," Agnolo said one evening in July, "will ours be?"

"To the top of the cornice, twelve braccia," Tonio said. "Then the pediment, four and a half more. Sixteen and a half to the point."

"San Francesco is eighteen."

"San Francesco is twenty-four braccia wide."

Agnolo did not look at him. He looked at the saint. "I want it higher than the friars."

---

Tonio showed him the letter. Agnolo read it standing, holding it at arm's length because his eyes had begun to go. When he reached the line about the nose he went red at the neck and handed it back.

"He is very clever in Rome," he said, "with my money."

"He says that each part answers to the others, messer. If it is taller, it must be wider. And it cannot be wider, because the Ugurgieri will not sell."

"Then make it taller."

"Then it will not agree with itself."

"Then let it argue." Agnolo took his thumbs out of his belt, and that was a thing Tonio had not seen him do. "Tonio. My wife's name is going to be written across that front in letters a hand high. I will not have it under the feet of Saint Francis. Put another course on top. Two braccia. Over the cornice and under the pediment, a band of stone, and in the middle of it my arms. The friars can look up at it."

Tonio said he would write to Rome.

He did, that night, by the kiln, with Pippo holding the lamp. He wrote the patron's demand plainly and asked what should be done. He had no seal, so he pressed his thumb in the wax. The letter went down to Rome with the cloth-carrier and was not answered.

It was not answered in August, when the cornice blocks were cut. It was not answered in September, when they were set. The frieze went up that month, and in it the inscription, which Tonio had traced from the reverse of the Roman sheet onto the stone with charcoal and a pricked paper. Then old Meo da Lucignano cut it, the best letter-cutter between Siena and Cortona, who could not read:

NANNAE · CONIVGI · OPTIMAE · ANGELVS · BRANDOLINVS · POSVIT

Meo cut the letters with their shadows on the right-hand side, as the Roman drawing showed. He did not know what they said. He knew only that the drawing made the thick strokes thick and the thin strokes thin, and that the round of the O was a true circle and not an egg. When the frieze was set, the sun stood over the cloth-shearers' lane in the late afternoon and came across the piazza low. It filled every letter with shadow, so that the name stood out of the grey stone as if written in ink.

Agnolo came that evening, and the evening after, and every evening. He stood under the frieze and did not look at the friars.

At the beginning of October he told Tonio to cut the extra course.

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There is a kind of man who, ordered to do a wrong thing well, will do it badly to show that it is wrong. Tonio was not that kind. He was paid, and the stone was paid for, and his name was on nothing. He cut the extra course from the same grey sandstone, two braccia high. He worked it to the same face, and set it with the same care as the rest, square and true and with joints you could not have pushed a knife into. In the middle of it Meo carved the arms of the Brandolini: a lion holding a carding-comb, which made the town laugh, under a helm with a plume. Meo did not know what the arms meant either. He gave the lion the best mane he had ever cut.

Above the extra course Tonio built the pediment, one module and a half, exactly as the drawing said. In its triangle there was nothing. Agnolo had not asked for anything there, and Tonio did not offer.

They struck the scaffold on the eve of All Saints. Half the town came out to the piazza to see the front with nothing in front of it. The friars came to the door of San Francesco. A woman sold chestnuts roasted in a pan with holes in it.

The front was white where the new stone had been dressed and still damp. It was handsome stone, well laid. It stood eighteen and a half braccia to the point of its pediment, half a braccio higher than the gable of the friars, if you measured from the paving. Anyone who wished to could measure it, and several did, with a cord, by throwing a stone over and pacing the shadow.

It looked wrong.

Nobody in the piazza could have said why. The door was good, and the windows were good. The frieze with Nanna's name in it was the best thing in the town, and the cornice above it threw a shadow along the whole width like a ruled line. And above the cornice the front went on, as if the building had reached the end of its sentence and not noticed. It said its last word twice. The extra course stood between the cornice and the pediment like a second hat pressed down over the first. Below it the oratory had been a face; above it there was a forehead with nothing behind it. The lion with its carding-comb sat in the middle of that forehead and was the first thing you saw. You saw the lion before the door, before the name, before anything.

Tonio stood at the back of the crowd by the chestnut-woman's brazier and held up his thumb at arm's length. For thirty years it had been his habit, when a wall was finished, to cover its width with his thumb from a fixed point and see what was left over above. From here, with the oratory, there should have been his thumbnail and a sliver of sky. There was his thumbnail and a sliver of sky, and above that the lion.

Pippo was with him, eating chestnuts out of a twist of paper and burning his fingers.

"It's wearing two hats," the boy said, loud enough.

A man laughed. Then another. It went through the crowd the way a word goes through a crowd when everyone has been thinking it and nobody has had it. Due cappelli. Someone said it of the lion. Someone said Agnolo had put his own head on top of his wife's. The friars at the door of San Francesco did not laugh, which was worse.

Agnolo was standing in the middle of the piazza where he always stood. He did not turn round. He looked up at the front for a long time while the light went off it from the bottom up. It went first from the door, then from the windows, then from the frieze. For the space of perhaps two Paternosters the letters of Nanna's name were in shadow and the lion was still in the sun. Then the lion went dark too. Agnolo put his thumbs in his belt and walked home by the cloth-shearers' lane without speaking to anyone.

---

The letter from Rome came three days later, in the saddlebag of the same cloth-carrier, who said it had been given him at the Porta del Popolo by a servant in good shoes and that he had been told it was urgent. It was dated the eleventh of August.

It was short.

Master Tonio. I have your letter and your thumb, which I recognise as the mark of an honest man who has no seal. Your patron wants to be higher than the friars. Tell him that the friars' front is wider than his ground and that it is a poor front, because its round window is too large for its door, so that it seems all eye and no mouth. He has the chance to build a better one, and that is better than a higher one. If he puts a course above the cornice, his building will be like a man who has finished speaking and goes on talking, and everyone will remember the end of it and not the middle. Of the middle, I mean the frieze, I think you know my opinion. Do nothing to it. If he insists, build what he asks, and build it well. Then let him look at it. Nature is a better advocate than I am, and she is not paid. I salute you.

Underneath, in a smaller hand, as if added after sanding:

There is a genius for every praiseworthy thing. I do not know your patron's. Perhaps it is grief. That is not nothing, but it should not be built in stone.

Tonio read the letter twice. Then he folded it and took it, not to Agnolo's house, but to the piazza. Agnolo was standing there in the morning, which he had not done before, with a notary's boy holding his hat.

Tonio gave him the letter. Agnolo held it at arm's length. He read it, and folded it and put it inside his doublet, and did not hand it back.

"Take it down," he said.

"The course, messer?"

"The course. The lion." He looked at the frieze. In the morning the sun came from the other side and the letters were all light and no shadow, and you had to know they were there. "Can it be done without breaking anything below?"

"It can be done," Tonio said. "The pediment must come down first and go up again."

"Then let it come down first and go up again."

---

They put the scaffold back on the morning after the feast of San Martino, and the town came out again to see what had been put up being taken down. That is a spectacle people enjoy almost as much as a hanging and for some of the same reasons. Tonio lifted the pediment stones off one by one with the gin and numbered them in charcoal on their beds. Then he lifted the extra course, the eleven blocks of it and the lion, and lowered them onto the paving. The men on the ropes were careful, because the stone was paid for, and because there is something in a mason that does not like to see good work treated badly even when it ought not to be there.

Then he set the pediment back on the cornice where the drawing had put it, block on numbered block. It took four days. On the fourth day at evening he struck the last of the scaffold, and went to the back of the piazza and held up his thumb.

His thumbnail and a sliver of sky.

The front stood sixteen and a half braccia to its point. That was a braccio and a half less than San Francesco, and every man in the piazza could see it. Nobody said so, because nobody, looking at the two fronts side by side, any longer thought it was a thing worth saying. The friars' front was all eye and no mouth. The oratory stood on its feet. Its door was half the height of its cornice, and its windows half the width of its door. Its windows answered its door, and its frieze ran under its cornice like a line under a sum. In the empty triangle of its pediment there was nothing, and the nothing was exactly the right size. The sun came low from the cloth-shearers' lane and filled the letters of the frieze with shadow one by one from the left, NANNAE first. For as long as the light lasted it was the only thing on the front you could read.

Agnolo watched it go. Then he went home.

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The eleven blocks of the extra course lay at the foot of the oratory through the winter, in a row, because nobody could think what to do with stone that had been cut to a size that was not wanted. In February Agnolo paid Tonio to set them along the wall of the Ugurgieri house, facing the piazza, on a low footing, with their dressed faces upward and their joints as close as they had been on the front. The old men of the town sat on them in the sun, and the chestnut-woman set her brazier at one end.

The lion he had set into the paving of the oratory, face down, under the step of the door.

Tonio, who had built walls for forty years from other men's drawings and from none at all, never learned the name of the man in Rome. On fine evenings he sat on the end of the bench nearest the oratory with the short rod across his knees. He did not need it for anything; he only liked the weight of it. He watched the light go up the front from the door to the frieze. Sometimes Pippo, who was taller now than his father, came and sat beside him. The old man would hold up his thumb at arm's length, and the boy would hold up his, and they would look at each other's sky.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ā Leōne Baptistā Albertō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Leon Battista Alberti, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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